Sphera - Turn your emotions into your greatest allies

How working with emotions changed my life—and why I created the Sphera app, an emotion diary. A personal experience that unexpectedly led to the app's creation. How it all began. The last few years have been difficult, as I think they have been for most of you. For a long time, I lived in a state of constant anxiety and severe stress: emotional burnout, sudden outbursts of anger, emotional breakdowns, guilt over my reactions, and so on. I genuinely didn't understand why I reacted the way I did and why I couldn't control it all anymore. The result: health problems and lack of sleep. When I finally found a good psychologist, the first thing she advised was to start exploring my emotions.  The hardest part was tracking them daily and remembering to do it all by the next session. The main point wasn't even about describing the situation or mood of the day, but rather the emotions themselves—because they are that first, automatic signal that triggers a reaction, a feeling, and, ultimately, a mood. At first, I tried keeping a paper diary, but quickly gave up: it's not always handy, I forget, I write sloppily... My psychologist insisted that consistency was key, and only by developing the habit of noticing and recording them would I be able to progress in therapy. So, being a modern person, I decided to look for a mobile app. This way, it would always be at hand and would contain the entire history of my entries. And that's where I ran into a problem... Why I couldn't find a working tool and decided to create my own. All the popular apps I found were either simple diaries where you can scribble a bunch of text and attach photos, or mood trackers, or very superficial ones that didn't even mention any kind of processing. Select a face → write a few words → done. For me, this wasn't effective at all; I didn't understand what to do next. I started digging deeper and came across Paul Ekman's Basic Emotions Theory, which very succinctly lays out the basic human emotions, the feelings that arise from them, and the reactions. I couldn't find a single app that worked according to this model. Since I already had experience in mobile development (almost 10 years), and also knew professional psychologists, I decided I could try making it myself! What emotion tracking in Sphera gave me (and why the mood tracker doesn't work). 1. For the first time, I understood exactly what I was feeling. Sphera has an explanation for each emotion, its manifestations, and what it's associated with. For example: * Anxiety is a derivative of fear; * Anger most often appears when boundaries or expectations are violated; * Sadness is a signal of the loss of something important. My head used to be a mess; I simply realized I was worried, angry, etc., and I paid more attention to the situation and tried to sort it out than to look at my feelings. But when I began to understand my attitude toward what was happening and the underlying reasons behind it, that's when things really started to happen... 2. I learned to see the chain: emotion → feeling → mood. What psychologists talk about but rarely explain clearly. Emotion is momentary, feeling is more lasting, mood is the background. When you work only with mood, you're always looking too late, so it's difficult to see the connection. But when you go step by step, the picture becomes clearer. It's like watching a true crime movie (which I love): you need evidence, a location, and then a suspect. 3. Reflection gave me answers to "why this is so important to me." While creating Sphera, I realized that simply recording emotions, feelings, and triggers isn't enough; you need to go deeper and understand your reactions and thoughts about them. After all, we often don't realize why we reacted the way we did. It was necessary to develop a tool that would help uncover the essence of what was happening and focus not on describing the situation, but on why it affected you so much and where you get your feelings about it from. Different people in the same situation can experience completely different emotions and reactions, influenced by their experience, beliefs, and habitual behavior patterns. Understanding this was the goal of the Reflection section. By answering several guiding questions, you have the opportunity to delve deeper into your beliefs, see patterns, and challenge your negative thoughts (which, as it turns out, are often artificially created by you). And the main result is finding a solution, because it’s not enough to simply notice, write down, and reflect; you need to create a picture of the future for yourself, a plan for how this can be changed. 4. I stopped ignoring, shaming, and suppressing emotions. Previously, I believed that emotions like anger and fear needed to be suppressed—I couldn't lash out at everyone or be afraid of everything all the time. So, it was difficult at first to accept that these emotions weren't actually bad or my enemies, but merely signals. And the most counterintuitive thing for me was that the less I suppressed them, the less discomfort I felt, and most importantly, their intensity began to decrease! I became less overwhelmed by these emotions, releasing them gradually and in a healthy way, and this had a very positive impact on my relationship with myself, others, and the world in general. I no longer got irritated by everyone and everything around me. 5. Breathing exercises save me in the most difficult moments. Breathing practices were another personal discovery during the creation of Sphera. To be honest, I was skeptical at first, like, "Oh, I'll just take a breath, so what?" But it turns out that just as we can trick our brain by imagining the worst possible scenario, and our body reacts as if we're already in that situation, creating real stress, we can trick it with deep breathing—a signal that everything is calm now, there's no need to run, and there's no danger. After all, our brain has been shaped over millions of years with essentially one goal in mind: survival, which is why emotions like fear and anger are still the most important and meaningful to it. So it's no surprise that many of us are so stressed out right now. We practically don't face the same real threats to our lives every day as we used to, but the brain isn't used to being in this mode and tries to find them everywhere, even where they don't exist... 6. I saw my recurring patterns. By collecting data and creating reports and statistics based on it, I saw what was actually causing me the most stress and what I couldn't cope with. This opened my eyes to many things that needed to be changed in my life. 7. A gentle development of positive thinking without toxicity has emerged. Before working on the app, I greatly underestimated positive thinking; I thought it was either stupid or manipulative. But after studying this topic more, reading numerous studies and the opinions of authoritative psychiatrists and neuroscientists, I concluded that this is the key to that very balance. All sorts of crazy things will happen in our lives all the time. It's unavoidable, and it may not even depend on you. But by balancing these with happy moments in life, we can feel more confident and stable. That's how the "gratitude" section came about, where we're encouraged to learn to notice the good and focus on it, creating more such events in our lives as a counterweight to all the bad. If you're also struggling to understand yourself, try recording your emotions for at least a week—not your mood, not just your thoughts or descriptions of the situation, but your emotions in that situation. This is the foundation on which everything else is built: reactions, behavior, relationships, stress resilience, self-acceptance. And finally, no one will make you happier except you. But you can help yourself make this journey easier. That's exactly what I did—and it changed my whole life.